Andy Serkis as the singer Ian Dury, with Bill Milner, who plays Dury’s son Baxter.

Andy Serkis is best known for playing unaccountably lovablemonsters, so it’s only logical for him to star in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, which seeks to tell the story of the incorrigible New Wave singer Ian Dury without resorting to the same old biopic formula.

In a Q&A after yesterday’s Tribeca Film Festival screening, Serkis told a story that illustrated the extent of Dury’s fiendishness. Before shooting began, he and screenwriter Paul Viragh asked the Dury family to review the script, which takes a warts-and-all approach to portraying the singer (who died of cancer in 2000). It came back covered with notes, but not for the reason you might think. “They said, ‘No, he was much more of a cunt than that,’” Serkis recalled. “‘You’re going to have to be really down and dirty with him.’”What you might call Dury’s c-word-ishness is on full display in the film: disfigured on his left side by a childhood case of polio, he takes every opportunity to show those around him that, as he puts it, “I may be a cripple, but I’m dangerous.” He’s quick to violence, despite the fact that it almost always ends with him helpless on the floor. And he’s a rather spectacularly bad husband, as illustrated by the opening scene, in which Dury’s wife (Olivia Williams) interrupts band practice in the living room with the line “I’ve just given birth. Do you think you could keep the noise down?” Fatherhood is equally challenging, though the film argues that he ultimately served as a kind of enlighteningly shambolic role model to his son Baxter.

“To be a geezer like me,” the character of Dury tells one long-suffering companion, his co-writer and bandmate Chaz Jankel, “you gotta be a bit of a selfish loony.” Dury’s addictions to booze and marijuana seem to wax and wane, but nothing can displace his No. 1 addiction—to satisfying his own impulses, wherever they may lead. The result is great music some of the time, and aggravation nearly all of the time for anyone who gets too close.

Despite his gnarled physique and incandescent ego (or perhaps because of his incandescent ego), Dury was evidently irresistible to statuesque nurturers with excellent skin. Though they occasionally found it necessary to fling chinaware at him or toss his prosthetic leg off the balcony, they had a devil of a time breaking the spell he cast over them. His beautiful young girlfriend, Denise (Naomie Harris), is left to puzzle over the paradox that Dury’s physical problems are somehow less debilitating than her emotional problem—the inability to stop loving such an incorrigible bastard.

At the Q&A, director Mat Whitecross acknowledged that Dury never really made it in the United States. Apparently, he blew his big chance by acting like a jerk during a tour with Lou Reed. (Color me impressed; anyone who could out-misbehave Lou Reed in his prime must have been truly, madly insufferable.) So Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a welcome arrival, if only because it gives Americans a chance to rediscover an artist that Serkis, for one, describes as a “national treasure.” (Dury was also known as “the housewives’ favorite punk rocker,” something his boosters may not want to broadcast too loudly.)

But the film also works on its own terms. Serkis captures the qualities that made Dury a great frontman—his working-class swagger, his delight in word play, the vulnerability behind his often brutish veneer, and the magnetic charisma that in every era separates those who belong on stage from those who don’t. You can’t take your eyes off of him.

As for whether it avoids those dreaded biopic clichés, I’d say the record is mixed. There is simply no way to watch Dury arrive at his father’s wake in a permed mullet and a neckerchief and not think of Dewey Cox in Walk Hard. And a number of other chestnuts pop up along the way. Flashback to hardscrabble upbringing with unsupportive dad? Check. Unintentionally revealing interview with suspiciously naïve reporter? Check. Conspicious displays of bad parenting? Check. Long, agonizing spiral into addiction? CHECK!

Still, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll does a better job than most musical biographies of situating all of this in a context that feels almost like real life. Maybe that’s because it’s set in England, or because Dury got his taste of fame late in life (he was in his mid-30s, which is old for a rock ‘n’ roll upstart), or because he never did “break” America, as so few British bands actually do. We, as Americans at least, are presented with the story not of an icon but of an artist—one who insisted on being 100 percent himself, even if it meant acting like a monster.